ABSTRACT
In this chapter I argue that, in the context of an examination of women’s influence on culture in antiquity, it is impossible not to ‘look outside the box’ and consider not just their contribution to the world of ancient Greece and Rome but also the influence of Graeco-Roman ideas about women and their role on later Western European culture. After all, study of the ancient world is simultaneously a meditation on our own; and as we shall see, given the esteem in which the perceived wisdom of the Greeks and Romans was held in the Middle Ages and thereafter, the classical philosophical legacy is particularly prominent. In the ancient world a key dichotomy was that between nomos (man-made law or custom: masculine noun) and physis (nature: feminine noun), a dichotomy which has persisted to the present day and which can be shown to be, literally and metaphorically, a gendered dichotomy. In what follows I look at a particular aspect of this dichotomy, namely the equivalence of the male rather than the female with reason and the ability to do mathematics and science.1 The discussion includes a survey of the biographical treatment of women involved in the development of mathematics and science, particularly physics. This survey highlights a parallelism in the biographical treatment of women philosophers from antiquity and later female figures in science and mathematics: to a significant degree both ancient female philosophers and later female scientists were often either prevented from participating fully in their chosen fields or else accommodated only through their association with a distinguished male relative or family associate. The reasons for the social acceptability of the exclusion of women from philosophico-scientific endeavour from antiquity to the modern era are of course complex and beyond the scope of a single contribution to a volume such as this. However, it is worth emphasizing that what was believed to be the wisdom of the ancients was a powerful force in philosophical and
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Greek philosophy was transmitted as part of the cultural heritage of European society.2 The fact that ancient philosophy included mathematics and what would now be regarded as the natural sciences meant that later mathematicians and physicists who privileged ancient philosophy as source material for their own work saw the enduring misogyny of their own society bolstered and validated in the writings of the ancients, as will be seen in the discussion of passages from Plato and Aristotle below. The impetus for this chapter is primarily the research of the physicist Margaret Wertheim (1997), who has emphasized the enduring influence of, in particular, Pythagoreanism on the agenda and subject matter of modern high-energy physicists. Following on from Wertheim, I focus on the influence of purported Pythagorean elements on the thinking of key scientific figures. Because of the intractable misogyny of this philosophical and scientific tradition, we must at the outset note that the recovery and assessment of ancient and later women’s contribution to it is no easy task;3 and also that, given this environment, the achievement of the women who did manage to engage in philosophical and scientific discourse is, therefore, all the more remarkable.
